Intro

This document contains various maps showing adoption data from the Wisconsin Humane Society built to help plan for their participation in the Competitive Pet Placement project.

The adoption data visualized here was obtained and processed as follows:

  1. All cat and dog adoptions in 2019-2023 served as the raw data.

  2. Some additional cleaning was done for adoption addresses, primarily removing apartment numbers which could interfere with geocoding.

  3. The file was then geocoded using the Census Geocoder, which also provides a Census Tract for each geocoded address. 46622 (94%) out of the 49648 adoption records were geocoded successfully. The rest (which were spread across all years of data) were excluded from the analysis.

  4. To narrow down the mapping, only addresses from WI state were included. The final dataset contains 45,963 geocoded adoptions.

  5. Demographic data for all tracts in which adoption outcomes occurred were retrieved from the Census API.

All Adoptions

This first map shows all adoptions in the data (Total) as well as adoptions per 1000 households. Note that some areas have very few households, hence a few extremely high numbers. The per-household view accounts for the fact that places with more households are expected to have more adoptions, but it is not necessarily preferable over the absolute number for the purposes of choosing an area to focus on - after all, if there are more households in that area, there is (presumably more adoption potential). This just shows what areas, relative to their size, are adopting more/less.

Dogs

Cats

Both

Adoptions by Year

Each layer shows a heatmap of adoptions that took place in a particular year.

Adoption by Size (dogs)

Each layer shows a heatmap of adoptions of dogs of each size category. Extra Large dogs were merged into Large.

Census data

The data shown in the following maps is sourced from the Census API using the 2021 five-year American Community Survey (ACS).

The data is divided into three maps: demographic data including income and housing, race/ethnicity data, and data on % of residents speaking only languages other than English.(Note: this map was removed because the page became too heavy. Can be returned as needed – there were not huge areas where this was relevant other than Spanish that stood out in the area that primarily Hispanic/Latinx). Data is shown for all Census tract in which there has been at least one adoption.

Demographics

Below Poverty 100% refers to the % of residents that are below the federal poverty line, and Owner Occupied is similarly represented as a percent value of residents.

Race/Ethnicity

Values in the pop-ups for each Census Tract represent the % of its population that identified as the selected layer (the four largest ones).